On the cover of ‘Highway 61 Revisited’ Bob Dylan sits on a stoop in a mod blue and purple silk shirt, unbuttoned over a t-shirt promoting Triumph Motorcycles. His hair is long for 1965. His mouth is in a smirk but his eyes are wary, as well they should be.
Four years earlier he’d come to New York City from Minnesota to become part of, and then the exemplar of, the burgeoning folk-music scene. He took his inspiration from Woody Guthrie, like him acting and dressing like a country bumpkin (check out the corduroy cap on his first album cover) while singing barbed, sometimes funny, sometimes wicked songs in the folk idiom. Protest songs. And the folk-music community came to love him, to see him as the natural successor to Woody, and to, already, in the early 1960s, call him the voice of the new generation.
Think, just think, of the stones it took to simply walk away from all that. Which is what he did.
Dylan pissed off a huge chunk of his original audience when, after hearing the Beatles and the Animals, he realized he wanted to be something other than a folk troubadour and went back to the rock and roll he loved in high school. He famously “went electric” at the Newport Folk festival, scandalizing Pete Seeger and thousands of fans who equated electric guitars with pop—and therefor purely commercial—music. And then he went into the studio and emerged with one of my two favorite Dylan albums (the other is Blood on the Tracks, in case you care), “Highway 61 Revisited.”
There are two points I want to make that aren’t made often enough. The first is ridiculously obvious if you listen even casually. The short version is that “in 1965 Dylan left folk music for rock and roll.” But in 1965, “rock and roll” meant, at best, the Beatles and the Stones—who like everybody else were still largely only writing love (and, yeah, lust) songs. Nobody was writing anything like:
"God said to Abraham, 'Kill me a son' / Abe says, 'Man, you must be puttin’ me on' / God say, 'No.' Abe say, 'What?' / God say, 'You can do what you want Abe, but \ The next time you see me comin’ you better run' / Well Abe says, 'Where do you want this killin’ done?' / God says, 'Out on Highway 61'
Dylan broadened out what rock music on the radio could be about for every artist who followed—including, as they acknowledged, the Beatles and Stones.
But I’m really here to waste more of your Internet time and talk about that silk shirt. There’s something quintessentially American about that shirt. Because what it represents is that quintessentially American notion that this is a place where you can choose to recreate yourself.
You can show up here (the story goes) as the poor, the tired, the wretched refuse--and with imagination and the right breaks remake yourself into a new person. The Brits and our other European brethren were traditionally locked into class-defined roles, unlike on this continent, which had room for people to transform themselves, from their family name and beyond, to something completely different by act of will.
It’s why Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby,” continues to resonate: it plays off of this same idea. Poor punk Jason Gatz *did* become wealthy, mysterious Jay Gatsby. The story ends tragically and brings this American Dream into question—but every American reader understands why Gatsby thinks he’ll succeed. Recreating ourselves is supposed to be our birthright as Americans!
Yeah, I’m going on too long. Anyway, Dylan recreated himself from a Minnesota kid to, in succession, folk troubadour, rock’n’roll’s angry young man, and then a country gentleman (“Nashville Skyline”), a Vegas-style entertainer (“Budokan”) and a Born-again Christian scold (Slow Train Coming) and, most recently, an American Songbook crooner.
He is in good company. Musically, Miles Davis’s genius was in part finding the next cool thing, embracing it and making it his own (listen to the bebop sides, then, say, “Sketches of Spain” and “Kind of Blue” and then “Bitches Brew” and “Doo-Bop”). More obviously, talking about forging multiple new identities, there’s David Bowie. And then there are all those who forged a single new identity and stopped there—a list that starts with Elvis Presley and Little Richard and goes through all those who remade themselves into rockers, or hippies, or demons (a la Alice Cooper and KISS) or punks. I salute them all.
But my highest respect is for those whose muses kept them *continually* reinventing themselves—a shorter list.
And of those, Bob Dylan tops the list for me. Because, as the anointed successor of Woody Guthrie and (say it with me) The Voice of a New Generation as a result of his folk/protest music, he was at an unimaginable pinnacle—and he still chose to throw it all away and be jeered and reviled in order to follow his muse. (Yeah, it all worked out, but he didn’t know it would).
And then he climbed the new ladder of rock stardom—and threw it all away again. (And then again. And again, again. And…)
I bought “Highway 61 Revisited” at “Make Waves,” a punk/New Wave record store that briefly existed on State Street in Ann Arbor in 1980—the same place I, a bespectacled, shy kid, chose to buy a leopard-skin t-shirt.
(It was my right as an American.)